Abstract
The advent of implicit measures opened the access to processes of which
people might not be completely aware but that can still influence their
attitudes, preferences, and behaviors towards different objects. Among
the existing implicit measures, the Implicit Association Test (IAT;
Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) is one of the most studied and
used. The descriptive literature review presented in this work was aimed
at providing an overview of how the IAT has been used from the year of
its first introduction until current days. Specifically, the main fields
of application of the IAT, the specific topics for which it has been
used, and its concurrent use with other implicit measures have been
highlighted and described. When possible, information on the samples on
which the studies were carried out are reported. Results indicate an
on-going growth of the IAT in a constantly wider range of topics. The
ability of the IAT to overcome self-presentation biases and to access
the implicit aspects of attitudes have been particularly exploited for
investigating biases towards different out-groups, especially in
sensitive contexts.